With cotton prices on the low side, the only chance of it earning much overall profit is for heavy production. But despite more planted acreage, that’s not guaranteed either.

“It’s just dry, and we may be looking at another short crop,” Dan Smith, who farms near Lockney, said.

Smith said he noticed a price spike in 2010 that declined soon afterward.

“It’s gone down every year since,” he said.

The futures market lists cotton at about 78 cents a pound, what some experts consider the minimum to cover operating expenses.

Brad Heffington, a Littlefield-area producer, is concerned prices could decline even further. For that reason, he recommended fellow growers not wait to contract their crop.

“I think a farmer should market now,” he said. “I think there’s a strong chance prices will be even lower in the fall.”

Steve Verett, executive vice president of Plains Cotton Growers, described that 78-cent cotton as a “break-even price” that would need to reach at least a few more cents to earn a significant profit margin.

And with crop insurance prices not completely set and direct payments gone from the new farm bill, growers are particularly dependent on the market economy.

“We need the price to stay in those upper 70s to provide good risk-management for our producers,” Verett said. “Ideally, we’d like to see it in the mid-80s, but the market is not seeing that.”

Like other goods, cotton prices are based on supply and demand. And in today’s world economy, that supply faces fewer boundaries than it did a few generations ago.

While lingering drought concerns West Texas farmers about not having enough cotton, an abundance of it across the globe isn’t helping them either.

China now holds about half the world’s cotton — or roughly 50 million bales — and not all of it is headed for textile mills. Most is being held in warehouses with no immediate intended use.

If the country maintains that supply, prices aren’t likely to skyrocket any time soon, said Darren Hudson, an agricultural economist at Texas Tech.

“It keeps prices from rising too much,” he said. “U.S. prices were higher in the past.”

Exactly what China plans to do with that much cotton is not yet clear, Hudson said.

Continuing the stockpiling program indefinitely could be expensive and wasteful, as raw cotton’s shelf life is about five years, he said. Another option could be to sell all the stocks, he said, or they could keep some bales and release others.

“More likely they’re going to start releasing some stocks and transition out of a stockpiling program,” he said.

But if they don’t?

China’s supply contains some domestic cotton but is mostly imported.

The U.S. always has the option to stop selling theirs to China, in a protest of sorts of how they’re using it. That could work in theory — if a list of other countries weren’t ready to take the U.S.’s spot in the cotton trade.

Hudson compared that scenario to a wheat embargo in the 1970s, when the U.S. halted exports of that commodity to the Soviet Union. The Soviets responded by importing more wheat from Iran instead, and their economy was hardly dampened.

“All that happened was someone else sold the wheat,” Hudson said.

Meanwhile, farmers are preparing their fields and hoping for a wet spring.

“Hopefully we can get some rain around planting time to get this crop going,” Heffington said.